Thoughts on effective leadership that I've collected over the years
I try to be the best person that I can be - daily.
I am not good at everything, in fact, I can only claim to be an expert eater of food and drinker of coffee and beer.
This is meant to be a unique and raw perspective on leadership. It is crafted after both observing leaders that I admire, and trying to replicate that for myself. I tried my best to write something that you've hopefully never read anywhere else.
In that order, every day.
Managers are transportation mediums for direction.
Leaders realize direction into outcomes into results.
Make things that illustrate your vision. Make things that help you practice your craft. Make things to show you can literally create value. Make things to encourage others. Make things to fail. Make things to learn.
Teach things that fill gaps for your team. Get others to teach things to you that fill your gaps.
Teach to validate your learning. Teach things to practice your communication (of technical concepts).
Learn technology trends and what is new on the tech radar. Learn about how to be a better boss from other people by observing them. Record yourself presenting, learn from your own feedback. Survey your team and learn from their feedback, learn from peer feedback, learn from self-reflection. Learn how you best learn specific things (e.g. Udemy, YouTube, TED Talks, hackathons, books, podcasts, MeetUps). Make and teach things to prove you have learned. "Taking a class" without an outcome is not learning.
- Do take action with the things you learn, don't just post that you read books or finished a course, post about the actions you took from the books/podcasts/videos/training you took. Take notes, make a plan, block time in your calendar to practice ref
- Do not recommend podcasts, do recommend specific podcast episodes and the outcome you received that you think others would benefit from. Quote the podcast directly.
- Do not continue to have unproductive meetings. Do not have status meetings. Do ensure that every single person in a meeting should either be receiving value or providing value.
- Do not have watercooler chats on Slack, these take away from productivity.
Do limit your "feel good" Slack channels and favor 1:1 conversations.
Do/leaveSlack channels that waste your time by distracting you that are not providing value.
When you use @channel you are disrupting people's lives. If you really need to do that, you had better have a good reason.
You owe it to your company and everyone involved to call out people who don't bring a clear purpose and outcome to a meeting. See Episode 65 of The Modern Manager. If you want to get serious, use a combination of speaker diarization and loopback to record meetings so that you can verify all invitees are speaking.
People talk more than others. Keep verbose speakers from taking over meetings by allocating time.
Use termdown to allocate time and stick with your allocations.
Use parking lots
and action items to follow-up with discussion outside of your meetings. Allocate times to sprint demos and standup until
you no longer need to strictly measure time.
"You were born with two ears and one mouth for a reason” 55 AD from Epictetus Ask questions, but don't ask meaningless questions - ask with intent. Are you refining your perspective? Seek first to understand.
Get into the details of what your team does to understand strengths and opportunities. Do not rely on hear-say, but value 360 feedback. Managers who praise unchallenging and non-technical outcomes look bad when technical people realize that work was not challenging.
Stray away from giving "single point in time" feedback that seems nit-picky. Look for behavioral trends (and three points is a trend) and give holistic feedback to build strength amongst your team or the people you work with. Treat feedback as a precision tool pointed at events, artifacts, things that were created, communication, behaviors, use some Johari mindset to uncover blindspots.
Calibrate your understanding of technical challenges by asking questions and reviewing documentation. Be able to accurately and intelligently speak about what your team has done and the work it plans to do.
Surprise your team - do things for your team that are boring and let them know that you took care of it. The last thing people want is mundane and meaningless work. If you cannot eliminate it, trade off in taking the share of burden from your team. This shows that you care and that you are also competent in handling some of the work.
People love responsive replies. It makes them feel like you care about them. Always respond to emails with value and never only respond with "thank you". When you provide meaningful communication it may mean that you stop sending emails and may mean that your team has less distractions.
Instead of sending an email, determine what the right course of action should be:
- Pin something to a Slack channel
- Update documentation
- Create a User Story/Bug
- Add a calendar reminder
Prototype - buy down risk for the future and prove that something can be done. How do you know if something is able to be implemented? Learn the minimum amount of technology that you need to prototype what you're looking for. Provide a north-star by creating a dimmer version of that star.
Wait - I need to write code to be an effective manager?
Yes. If you have "software engineer" in your "software engineering manager" title, you need to write code.
You won't sling as much code as a software engineer, but you need to show that you are competent in your role by being
a model for your team to follow. If you aren't in software engineering, you still need to create things as part of your job.
These creations may not hold a candle to someone more technical on your team who is executing, without meetings, daily.
Mockup your vision. You need to put in due diligence for your ideas and direction. You cannot expect a sentence to describe everything you're looking for. Create diagrams, photoshop a mockup, provide example output - do everything you can to fight the fact that humans are not good communicators, especially of technical content. If you can't prototype, illustrate.
Every company wants to innovate, create innovative things, attract and retain people who want to do innovative stuff. The truth is that you can't always be doing crazy and amazing things.
What is innovation? Look at this in terms of outcomes to answer this question.
- Patents - amazingly unique ideas that no one has thought about
- Products - trailblazing apps that people love to use and/or are backed by crazy innovative technology
- Process - the opposite of doing the same thing for 5 years
When you define innovation for your company or team - how are you defining it? The way you answer this question determines how you drive down the innovation road.
Block out time for your team to have an opportunity to do something completely nuts...once or twice a year. Encourage them to build creative things during their work week - every. single. day. Don't delay people from fixing a broken process, prototype a better product, or experimenting to confirm to kill a product (from HBR Ideacast: Episode 664).
Create an open culture - be both a leader and a follower - you don't have better ideas than anyone else, you need to get them out of everyone else by asking refining questions, getting more into the weeds, make sure that every voice is heard.
Include the right people - diversity is always a great idea: you need people with different viewpoints and backgrounds before you start anything (see WorkLife with Adam Grant - The Daily Show's Secret to Creativity). You need to find (or create) tenacity around experimentation and diversity of thoughts. Look for people who have voluminous ideas and also like to tinker with those ideas. From the saying "don't mistake action for accomplishment" - don't mistake ideas for action. A good balance of putting ideas into action is what you want to encourage. People have to want to be innovative and need time to be innovative.
Focus on topics - free brainstorming creates breadth, but doesn't get anything done. The ultimate trade-off from innovation is warm and fuzzy ideas and getting things done. Sure, take time to brainstorm, but brainstorming by itself is not innovation. Funnel brainstorms into documentation, refine those thoughts, use a lean canvas to put a dollar amount on the idea, experiment, deliver. Focus on themes and topics, your job as a leader is to distill down the company's challenges and mission into themes for the team to feed from.
Never, ever, ever, ever - ask for a blanket of "innovative ideas". Innovative ideas come as a result of focus on a problem. Work to define problems, and encourage innovative ideas around those specific things. If you get an email that asks you to populate "innovative productivity-related ideas" - don't just forward this to your team. Add your perspective, your problem statements, then ask the team to think about those or introduce their own. Seed brainstorms, water them too - don't just throw things out and hope they stick. See Surprise your team above.
Encourage deep education in weak team areas - it's hard to come up with innovative ideas that aren't specific. Answering the "how" of a problem is almost as important as the "why". From a patentability standpoint, you need to dive into details to be considered by the USPTO.
Obtain or learn breadth - You need to know a little about a lot. The more broadly you, or an aggregation of your team knows, the more you'll avoid wasting time building things that already exist. Always try to tie innovation to existing teams and products. Use Slack search, Confluence search, even Google search - read about what other teams are working on. You rarely need to start a project with little knowledge - take some time to understand the landscape around you.
My motivation for this section was inspired by this TED talk on How to build a company where the best ideas win. I constantly look for (disruptive) new perspectives, radical on both sides of the spectrum, and this video has many elements of transparency that brought forth the ideas in this section.
Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden. It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic.
Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work (p. 323). Simon & Schuster.
Leadership through transparency creates an environment where people are authentic, information is quick and effectively shared. With transparency comes reciprocal trust where everyone has an equal priority to the same information. Every employee has an equal right to information and knowledge.
Knowledge is power. Adam Grant notes that power comes from a collective, not from a specific individual. Leaders concerned with power and authority need to realize that trust and transparency is what creates a great workplace.
Leaders must remind themselves and advise others that to achieve the new American Dream requires one thing that is certain: you must balance knowledge (the head) with wisdom (the heart). It’s no longer just about what you know, but what you do with what you know. In the new American economy, it’s about transparency, trust, opening up your heart and leading with kindness.
Present agendas before meetings and talk through them in email or Slack. Do not treat meetings as the initial mechanism for information flow. When you have that many people in a room, you are burning money for every person who isn’t involved. Allow people to do some homework and prepare their brain before meetings in order to get the best productivity out of them.
One-liner sentences are ripe for confusion and misunderstanding. If you have to give a one-liner, be sure to point to additional documentation, or ask for follow-up questions. As a leader, you need to realize that the amount of effort you put into communication is symbolic of the outcome. Do not spend 30 seconds to quickly write an email or Slack message for a million-dollar project. Effort is required in transparent and accurate communication. Talk through your thought process.
People see through verbose and dodging responses. Humans are smart. Unlike cabbage, humans have the ability to reason. When you are asked a direct question, give a direct answer. I know there is a balance between transparency and political, HR-friendly, positive responses, but your team deserves to know the truth. When leaders continually provide canned responses, they lose integrity. First, be sure you understand the question being asked by asking refining questions and seek first to understand. Feel the room, understand if this is a tense time in your company, find an answer that is (1) truthful, (2) detailed, and (3) thoughtful. When leaders take 5 minutes to answer a question, either their internal timer is not working correctly or they are purposefully wasting time (to prohibit other questions from being asked). You should take time to formulate a response, provide a follow-up direction (e.g. talk to person X or check out page Y), and succinctly answer the question. You may need to add an alternate explanations if you notice that your answer is not well-received. Be selectively vulnerable.
Be present in retrospectives. Document stop, start, and continue along with your team. Execute action items and report back to the team on your status. Make people aware of the work you are doing to make your team and your company a better place to work.
To enable this disciplined problem-solving behavior, we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry. High performers used a disciplined approach to solving problems, using production telemetry to understand possible contributing factors to focus their problem solving, as opposed to lower performers who would blindly reboot servers.
Kim, Gene. The DevOps Handbook: IT Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.
Survey your team and share back your interpretation of surveys. You should put in more time than your team takes to give meaningful feedback through (anonymous) surveys at regular intervals. Summarize key patterns and actions, link survey outputs to initiatives and continue to remind everyone involved as you march forward. Months later, hopefully after a successfully executed campaign, be sure to remind the team that you worked on this initiative or project because of their survey feedback.
Don’t continue to support the status quo of “blindly rebooting servers” with your team. If you have proper instrumentation of health signals in your team, you should be able to spot areas of improvement. Some examples of "instrumentation in leadership” can include:
- Productive 1:1 meetings (at least every 2 weeks)
- Patterns in retrospective
- GitHub metrics - see Flow (GitPrime)
- Bug reports
- Patterns in email or Slack conversations
- Demands of on-call
- Feedback from new hires
- Regular surveys
Your job as a leader is to measure everything and use operational excellence concepts to find root cause, experiment, and improve.
Disseminate what your team is working on, on a regular basis. You likely work within a closed circle of people on projects, be sure to share status and milestones with the greater community to:
- Increase visibility for your team
- Seek external eyes for validation and review
- Provide equal access to knowledge
There are some managers who keep their heads down with their eyes focused on initiatives. You need to look up and look around once in awhile and outwardly listen and speak to a broader community.
Don’t rely on a single email to inform. Most people have a crazy number of email filters, emails get filled away, unread, and knowledge is lost. If you are counting on an email to keep people up-to-date, you are living in 1999. Directly Slacking with people is the best way to get information out there when you cannot meet in person. You need to treat every communication as a marketing campaign. It is not a fire-and-forget, but a fire-and-follow-up model. Humans have many information beams that hit their short-term memory, you need to acknowledge this and revisit your information dissemination on a frequent basis to convert it into long-term memory. Track your impact by using Confluence, or other means to know who has read your documentation. This will help you gauge how successful your information campaign was.
Keep a changelog. Version your communication in the same way that GitHub does. Be able to illustrate how your communication has changed because of new information or from a new strategy. Don't be afraid to maintain an archive of information. People change. Thoughts, goals, and strategies - those change too. When information lineage is transparent, it allows for even more trust because you aren't hiding anything.
Treat information flow as continuous. Don’t wait until the end of the month, share what you know, when you know it. Allow for people to self-select the information they receive, don’t dam the river of information. “Trickle this down to your teams” isn’t effective, especially if the recipient doesn’t stay on top of their email or they are on vacation. Blast information continuously to people who will care about it. Use distribution lists with subscribe and unsubscribe features so that people can self-elect to receive different kinds of information, send that same email information to the corresponding Slack channel(s). Remind everyone on regular intervals how they can keep up-to-date.
Find the right periodicity for your periodicals. Chunk information together, don’t spam, and allow for information discovery. Look to kill emails that hold no value, specifically look at non-human emails that your team receives to understand why they exist and if they can be removed. Your goal as a leader is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of communication to your team. Look to recommend digests, combining multiple emails, or splitting out communications to different channels.
Forwarding an email with "FYI" does not help your team. Summarize the key points from the email that you want everyone to be aware of. By you taking the time to summarize, you reduce the total time that is lost reading and interpreting the email (e.g. 2 minutes to read times 10 people is 20 minutes - if you summarize that may be 30 seconds to read, with 10 people, that now is 5 total minutes instead of 20). Within your forward, link to documents for more information. Before you forward, ask refining questions you think your team would ask to the author, then once you have all of the ducks in a row, forward to your team.